Smartphone market watchers have generally focused on the battle between the big boys - Nokia, Apple, Research in Motion (Rim) and the Android crowd - in their analysis of the last quarter's sales.
But the quarter's biggest launch was Microsoft's attempt to get back in the game, with Windows Phone 7, the smartphone platform built …

Win Pho7 != Win Mob 6.5

The article was not precise....

but I believe you'll find that NPD's data is on the smartphone in particular, not PDAs and embedded systems. Until the second half ot the quarter, the MS OS for shipping smartphones was WinMo 6.5 -- and I'll bet there are still a few in channel. On that basis, I'd say the article's analysis was sound.

Couldn't give them away

Yup, in the US

However, when you look at it, it's basically buy 1 handset on a new contract, get another handset free (on another new contract). So it was essentially halving the up front cost of the handset, if you bought 2. You still needed to enter into 2 contracts - so not quite the bargain that it sounds, and most probably, not something which (excessively?) artificially inflates the handset sales figures.

Channel stuffing

2% seems tiny, but...

... it's pretty damned good for an OS that had barely been in the market for more than a couple of months.

WebOS had over two years to reach a similar level, and that's with the "Palm" name recognition, but that flopped big time. That WinPho7 managed to get above 1% is therefore not too shabby given the timescales involved.

Another point is that there simply aren't anywhere near as many devices running WinPho7 as there are running some flavour of WebOS and Android.

Take a look at the sales graphs Apple's CEO likes to show off for their iPhone sales each year and you can see that even iOS started out with a fairly small market share. They were happy with a few million sales in the first *year*.

Personally—and this is a little strange coming from a Mac user—I hope WinPho7 does well. I don't expect it to stomp all over its market as its desktop brother did in the 1990s, but the industry needs *multiple* independent sources of UX R&D. Google isn't going to provide it, and WebOS has taken two years to reach a market share WinPho7 achieved in just 90 days.

(I suspect WebOS may do better on tablets, assuming HP's follow-through is solid.)

First release effect

There are two ways to read that 2%....

Optimistic: It's new and unknown and was only on sale for half a quarter. Therefore 2% is really quite good and if we grow by 2% every half of a quarter well have something like 20% market share by the end of the year !! and by the 2015 we'll have 150% market share!!!

Pessimistic: We advertised the hell out of it and some people have been waiting for a while. That 2% was the mad rush of punters wanting the device. Now that they've bought theres is anyone else going to buy?

I expect reality is somewhat closer to the latter. Just like Zune and Kin.